The archived blog of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Jan 30, 2006

CongressDaily reported last Friday that a study found that the Pentagon "can safely delay expensive plans to replace its fleet of aerial-refueling planes, contradicting longstanding Air Forces claims." This reinforces the Senate Armed Service's opposition, led by Senator McCain, to the Boeing tanker leasing deal.

One congressional staffer told CD, "The wings are not falling off," referring to common claim by the Air Force that they are.

POGO and McCain examined the sweetheart deal for Boeing and concluded that buying the tankers outright would have been cheaper than leasing them.

This taxpayer ripoff eventually led to a swirl of congressional, media and internal Pentagon scrutiny which led to resignation of Air Force Secretary James Roche and the conviction of two Boeing executives-- Darleen "Dragonlady" Druyun, a former Air Force acquisition official, who admitted to negotiating a job with Boeing while hooking them up; and Michael Sears, Boeing's chief financial officer.

POGO filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request late last year for a copy of the KC-135 Recapitalization Analysis of Alternatives (AoA), but was denied (pdf). The Air Force based this denial because the AoA has classified and proprietary information and is (was?) a draft version.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that court papers show that David H. Safavian, former general counsel at the General Services Administration, tipped off fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff that Tyco, one of Abramoff's clients, was about to have its government contracts suspended.

In the Post story, Tyco's lawyer George Terwilliger admits that the tip, which Abramoff in turn passed onto Tyco, was of "substantial benefit" (Those are the Post's words; What did Terwilliger actually say?) since it allowed the company through its law firm McKenna, Long and Aldridge to address the GSA's concerns before the suspension went into effect. In the New York Times story Sunday, Terwilliger said something quite different; in his words: "Any benefit to Tyco was incremental at best, because company officials were due to get a formal notice from G.S.A.. [POGO's emphasis]" Which was it? In both stories, Terwilliger said that Tyco did not solicit the tip.

So it looks like this a second example of Safavian helping out Abramoff from the inside of GSA. Later on, did Safavian help Abramoff out when he was at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy? Are there any other agency officials who were helping out Abramoff or other lobbyists? Do you have any clues? Send us a tip if you do.

According to today’s story, NSA whistleblowers were labeled “delusional,” “paranoid" or “psychotic” in order to “protect powerful superiors who might be incriminated by damaging information.” Four of them lost their jobs but one anonymous whistleblower still works inside the agency. Their stories illustrate the difficulties that national security whistleblowers currently face when they raise concerns about illegal or unethical activity by government officials. Doing so can be career suicide.

For example, NSA whistleblower Russ Tice lost his battle against a psychiatric evaluation which forced him to leave the agency. But according to CNS: “Tice furnished Cybercast News Service with documents that appear to contradict the NSA's conclusion in his case. The news service verified the contents of the documents with the authors.” An anonymous former linguist describes a series of incidents where dissent was discouraged and led to retaliation: “The targeted person suddenly is described as 'not being a team player,' as 'disgruntled,' and then they're accused of all sorts of bizarre things. Soon they're sent to the psych people." Another anonymous employee alleged “that the NSA plants false evidence in personnel files as part of the intimidation campaign.”

Stay tuned…CNS promises a second installment on its investigation tomorrow.

MORE: Here's part II of the Cybercast News articles on NSA whistleblowers. And, it's even more devastating than the first.

POGO has been accused of possessing classified and sensitive security information several times in retaliation for disclosing information which embarrassed government bureaucrats. In one case, the Air Force retroactively classified a document which proved the existence of the super-secret Area 51 then used its classification as a pretext to attempt to take the organizations files. In another example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission threatened POGO with criminal prosecution after the New York Times published an article concerning our criticisms of the agency's nuclear security oversight. But, the agency refused to identify what information in our letter was considered sensitive, putting us in a silenced catch-22 of being unable to publish the letter and unable to fix the letter. This kind of ruling may also have a chilling effect on attempts to challenge government secrecy like our recently successful lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft over the inappropriate classification of publicly available information.

Jan 23, 2006

It was biodefense wonkfest hour today at the breakfast briefing on the 2006 biodefense legislative agenda held by the DC Office of the Monterey Institute. Speaking were Robert Kadlec and David Bowen, Majority Staff Director of the US Senate Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness, and Minority Staff Director for Health Policy on the US Senate HELP Committee respectively. Here are some of the more interesting moments for POGO's Nick Schwellenbach who attended the event.

Almost as an aside, Kadlec discussed how the Constitution (Kadlec even pulled out a pocket Constitution as a prop) mentions nothing about public health or preparedness for biological threats, be they natural or intentionally created. Yet that doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare, since, for example, "an accidental release of SARS from a lab" might lead to a breakdown of order across the nation. At least implicitly, this statement acknowledges that the hundreds of labs across the nation and the world that work on deadly and/or highly infectious pathogens are a potential risk in themselves. In fact, there have been outbreaks of SARS that have stemmed from labs working on the disease. And, as noted on this blog, there have been numerous accidents at labs doing biodefense work. Such work has grown exponentially in the last several years, leading many to believe that more accidents will occur.

Jan 20, 2006

A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) internal only job announcement will likely lower the quality of the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) by allowing all TSA employees, such as screeners and administrative personnel, to become air marshals. Currently, most air marshals that were originally hired are experienced law enforcement professionals. Screeners and administrative personnel rarely have any prior law enforcement experience.

By opening air marshal positions to TSA employees, TSA hopes to fill the ever-larger holes in its coverage of flights, since air marshals have been leaving FAMS in droves due to allegedly poor management and very low morale.

According to one Las Vegas-based air marshal, "At this point TSA/FAMS is just looking for as many warm bodies as they can find to hurriedly fill in the hemorrhaging losses we are currently experiencing...The only FAMs that are going to be left are former screeners and admin personnel... with guns on planes...and zero former law enforcement experience."

“Every employee in TSA” was "asked to complete the OAS in February 2004,” according to a memorandum to TSA employees dated December 4, 2003. The results from the OAS are meant to “assist TSA in evaluating its performance (strengths and weaknesses).”

These results further support the findings of a Office of Personnel Management (OPM) survey administered to the Department of Homeland Security (and other agencies) and reported on by the Oct. 16, 2005 New York Times article, “Study Ranks Homeland Security Dept. Lowest in Morale.” That survey showed, for example, that DHS (TSA is located within DHS) employees overwhelmingly did not feel like they were "encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things" or that personnel decisions were "based on merit."

Previously, only the aggregated 6 page “Corporate Snapshots” of the OAS was available, as obtained by Mark Arsenault through FOIA at Screeners Central. Arsenault had run into difficulty in obtaining the full results through FOIA and was presented with a $840 charge to obtain them. Arsenault says that he has promised TSA he will pay the fee three times in the last year, yet TSA has still not released to him the documents that POGO obtained. POGO was also able to obtain a fee waiver for our FOIA request. POGO seems to have run into fewer difficulties with its FOIA request than Mark Arsenault, presumably because of POGO's status as an established organization. TSA should not have arbitrarily determined that Aresnault’s efforts were not equally in the public interest.

According to Arsenault, there are “11,000 hand-written comments from screeners who responded to the survey. Those comments would be the most damning evidence of abuse, corruption and mismanagement within the TSA.” TSA did not release these comments to either Arsenault or POGO. In TSA’s response to POGO’s FOIA, TSA says “TSA has no responsive records,” however POGO “may wish to contact the Office of Personnel Management which conducted the survey.” POGO will file a FOIA with OPM next week to try to obtain them.

Jan 12, 2006

Deploying his deep pockets, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) throws the annual holiday party for his committee staff. Some committees in Congress have their staff members cover the costs of their holiday party.

But House Government “Reform” Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) has come up a more creative arrangement. Lobbyists and defense contractors threw the annual holiday party for the Committee which, coincidentally, oversees federal agency contracting. Here's the invite.

Who needs Santa Claus when contractors have Chairman Tom Davis to thank for opening up the government’s coffers! By our calculation following the House gift rules, each of the nine sponsors could spend up to $450 per staff or member of Congress. That’s quite a party!!!

The December 15, 2005 bash was held in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building and was sponsored by:

-- Patton Boggs, which, in 2005, retained Peter Sirh, the former Staff Director for Davis’ House Government Reform Committee and former Chief of Staff to Davis. Sirh helped Patton Boggs rake in a hefty $260,000 lobbying fee from MCI in the first six months of 2005, in part to “Assist MCI with contract issues relating to specific government contracts…” MCI is competing for a $20 billion telecommunications contract which has been a pet project of Tom Davis. Committee staff members strenuously deny that Davis has a hand in choosing who gets the contract but a recent article suggested that contractors think otherwise.

Sirh’s access to Tom Davis was a hot commodity for Patton Boggs. While there, Sirh also lobbied for:

-- Innovative Defense Strategies, where Peter Sirh also worked in 2005, also sponsored the party. It’s an awfully strange coincidence that the firm gave a $5,000 political contribution to Tom Davis’ wife in 2003, although Jeanmarie Devolites and Tom weren’t married at that point.

--Defense contractor BearingPoint which reported a whopping $500,000 in lobbying expenses in 2005 (that’s a lot of Christmas parties!) including on “Govt. Contracting issues.” BearingPoint (previously KPMG) has supported Tom Davis’ annual legislative goody bag of contractor favors (known in shorthand as SARA and ASIA), some provisions of which he has succeeded in attaching to Defense Authorization bills.

Jan 11, 2006

Due to recent revelations of warrantless domestic spying by the National Security Agency and secret CIA detention centers in Eastern Europe, commentators on the left and right are debating the definition of what a government whistlebloweris. Perhaps the greatest debate and area of confusion swirls around the legal definition of a protected whistleblower and the layperson's understanding of what constitutes blowing the whistle. For example of the former, last week Rush Limbaugh cited the Whistleblower Protection Act on when federal agencies are in violation of the Act to define who can be labeled a whistleblower:

May I read to you what a whistleblower is, as legally defined? "A federal agency violates the whistleblower protection act if it takes or fails to take or threatens to take or failed to take a personnel action with respect to any employee or applicant because of any disclosure of information by the employee or applicant that he or she reasonably believes evidences a violation of law, rule or regulation." The bottom line here is that a whistleblower does not go public.

Regarding the latter point, a few clicks and keystrokes will take you to
Dictionary.com, where the definition of whistleblower is: "One who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority." Seems simple enough.

Though the Whistleblower Protection Act is weak, the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) is even worse. One of the most serious problems with it is that an employee or contractor of the CIA who wants to report wrongdoing cannot go to congressional intelligence committees without the CIA director giving him or her "direction on how to contact the intelligence committees in accordance with appropriate security practices." Problem with this is that the CIA director might not want Congress to look into the allegations of wrongdoing by the CIA whistleblower.

Clearly one can blow the whistleblower on what one perceives to be wrongdoing, but not receive whistleblower protections. In fact, this happens all the time.

Jan 08, 2006

In a case that echoes the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, two
Northern California Republican congressmen used their official
positions to try to stop a federal investigation of a wealthy Texas
businessman who provided them with political contributions.

Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by
federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire
Charles Hurwitz, documents recently obtained by The Times show. The
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was seeking $300 million from Hurwitz
for his role in the collapse of a Texas savings and loan that cost
taxpayers $1.6 billion.

The investigation was ultimately dropped.

The effort to help
Hurwitz began in 1999 when DeLay wrote a letter to the chairman of the
FDIC denouncing the investigation of Hurwitz as a "form of harassment
and deceit on the part of government employees." When the FDIC
persisted, Doolittle and Pombo — both considered proteges of DeLay —
used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to
subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including
details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz.

Then, in 2001, the two congressmen inserted many of the sensitive
documents into the Congressional Record, making them public and
accessible to Hurwitz's lawyers, a move that FDIC officials said
damaged the government's ability to pursue the banker.